<div dir="ltr">> <span style="font-size:12.8px">A tightly-coupled test harness is an incremental step towards a loosely-coupled test harness.</span><div><span style="font-size:12.8px"><br></span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8px">While going from specific to generic is usually the right approach, in this case I think going specific is going to create a lot of work that could be avoided until there's a more finalized version of what the long-term goal is going to be. Beyond that I'm not even sure how the build tool would integrate with XCTest in a way that amounts to more than "build it as an executable" and "run the executable." The language in the proposal raises a coupling concern, but technically speaking, it's not really going to be much of a concern.</span><br></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8px"><br></span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8px">The more big-picture point I want to make clear is that the build tool, IMO, shouldn't take an opinion on how tests are run, what their output is, etc. By just running a binary testing target with a main.swift and checking the exit status, we can push a lot of the specifics down into those tools which enables the community to develop testing tools more freely without having to wait for this discussion to be 100% finished (or for any sort of proposal/review process from the language/tooling itself, for that matter). Adopting more detailed standards, at this point, from a build-tool level, feels extremely premature.</span></div><div><br></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8px">So, between the facts that:</span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8px">- there's a perfectly acceptable intermediate step for almost all user experiences (including the "default" one of using XCTest), </span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8px">- this proposal is very prescriptive in some parts, and very broad and open-ended in others,</span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8px">- the proposal for integrating third-party testing tools is still under discussion,</span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8px">- some of the details here might be better off living in XCTest</span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8px"><br></span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8px">I just think this idea needs some more time to bake, from a technical perspective... and I think swift-build-dev is a good place to continue that discussion. </span><span style="font-size:12.8px">But as others mentioned the proposal is open-ended enough that I don't think doubling down on talking implementation details invalidates any of it -- the proposal as worded feels more like a declaration of direction than anything, and in general I like the direction! But I'd prefer some of the specifics (e.g, around testing output) be brought up to those working on XCTest instead of integrated with the build tool itself.</span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8px"><br></span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8px">So: proposal seems okay from a big-picture perspective, except for a few things, but I don't think this is ready to have work begin on it yet in earnest. And because of that, I'd say a simple, working version of testing should be implemented first, just to make the build tool more usable for many developers (including me).</span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8px"><br></span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8px">- Brian</span></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Jan 11, 2016 at 5:14 AM, Drew Crawford <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:drew@sealedabstract.com" target="_blank">drew@sealedabstract.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);border-left-style:solid;padding-left:1ex"><span>> I don't think the situations are the same. Quickly skimming that thread, it seems like people are arguing that the proposed feature is a step in the wrong direction. (I don't know enough to say if I agree with them; I'm simply characterizing their position.)<br>
<br>
<br>
</span>I argue that this proposal is a step in the wrong direction. I suspect David and Brian might argue that as well (I don't want to put words in their mouth though). So that is the sense in which the situations are similar: people are arguing the proposal is a step in the wrong direction.</blockquote></div><br></div></div>